In a multi-carrier CDMA communications system, two or more direct sequence CDMA signals are used to communicate information over a communications channel. With simulcast communications, the same information or data is communicated using all of the carrier frequencies, and it can be shown that the frequency diversity which is consequently provided is equivalent to direct spreading of the signal over the bandwidth occupied by the multiple carriers. The use of multiple carriers in a multi-carrier system can provide compatibility with existing systems; for example the bandwidth of each of the multiple carriers can be the same as the bandwidth of a single carrier in an existing CDMA communications system. Thus, the multi-carrier CDMA system can be overlayed with and can share the same spectrum as one or more single carrier CDMA systems, preserving many of the beneficial features of the single carrier system such as the orthogonality of code signals.
It is also desirable to obtain the advantage of the frequency diversity of the multiple carriers of the multi-carrier system for multi-path resolution at the receiver of the system, rather than this resolution being limited to that provided by the RAKE receiver operating on an individual carrier. An object of this invention is to facilitate providing this advantage.